3 Finalists Rise to the Top in Apps For America Contest

The Sunlight Foundation is wrapping up its second Apps for America contest, and it wants your help picking a winner. Amongst the three finalists are a government notice archive, data masher and what Sunlight's director calls "EveryBlock for federal data," referring to the site recently acquired by MSNBC.com.

This contest came with a challenge to expose the contents of Data.gov, the initiative to increase public access to government datasets.

GovPulse.us provides access to a database of articles from the Federal Register, the journal of the federal government (more at our GovPluse profile).

Using GovPulse, you can use filters to decide what is important to you. For example, view by department, location or date. The site's homepage provides a list of notices available for comment, highlighting those that have just opened and those that are about to close. Civic engagement has never been so easy.

DataMasher brings basic mathematics to data. Choose two from over fifty datasets, then add, subtract, multiply or divide to get new values.

For example, one user took the current population by state, divided by the number of representatives per state and came up with the people per representative. Denny Rehlberg may be the hardest-working man in congress, as he has to single-handedly represent Montana's nearly 1 million people.

This We Know lets you get local and explore government data about your community. Enter your city or zip code and get a list of facts (this app is our Mashup of the Day today).

Click an individual item and be taken to a breakdown of the data. Even better, from there you can go straight to the source in data.gov.

About the author:Adam DuVander
-- Adam heads developer relations at Orchestrate, a database-as-a-service company. He's spent many years analyzing APIs and developer tools. Previously he worked at SendGrid, edited ProgrammableWeb and wrote for Wired and Webmonkey. Adam is also the author of mapping API cookbook Map Scripting 101.